CANCER DIAGNOSIS CHANGES OUTLOOK FOR TV NEWSMAN

Advice, prayers and thanks flood in for Nancarrow

When the nice lady with the coffee saw the familiar man with the beanie, she had to stop.

“I admire you,” she said, hovering over the cafe table the man was sharing with his wife and daughter. “I just want you to know that.”

Another day, another random act of concern. Now that the news of his brain cancer has gone viral, San Diego newsman Loren Nancarrow gets that a lot.

On Jan. 27, the Fox 5 co-anchor ran into a doctor acquaintance at the grocery store. Talk turned to aches and pains, as chats with doctor acquaintances often do. Nancarrow mentioned some weird numbness in his hands and upper lip. Then for a brief moment, his speech became garbled, which was even weirder. The doctor told Nancarrow to go to the hospital. Immediately.

That evening, an MRI revealed that Nancarrow had a brain tumor. Four days and one four-hour surgery later, he found out he had brain cancer. Less than two weeks later, everybody knew.

Nancarrow’s condition became public because Nancarrow reported it. He has lived his life in San Diego’s public eye for more than 30 years, and he wasn’t going to pull the blinds down now.

“The reason I haven’t been in my anchor chair for the past few weeks is because I have brain cancer,” he wrote in a post on the blog his daughter Hannah forced him to start earlier this year. “The doctors tell me I have between 1 and 3 years to live. So boo-hoo, poor me.”

For the many San Diegans who have followed the wry, environmentally conscious TV man since he made his local debut on KFMB/Channel 8 in 1980, the news was unfathomable. When someone has been appearing in your home for as many years as Nancarrow has, they become more like friends than the strangers they really are. And San Diego responded accordingly.

They flooded his website with prayers, cyber hugs and thanks for his gardening tips. They shared their own cancer stories and advised him on support groups and alternative treatments.

When he wrote about the mysteriously uplifting powers of his new cobalt-blue manicure, they emailed photos of their own blue nails. They said the disease was no match for a guy like him. The notoriously unsentimental TV man felt both buoyed and humbled. There is a lot of that going around, too.

“I was absolutely shocked. I figured people I was friends with on Facebook would miss me on Facebook and that would be it,” the 59-year-old Nancarrow said over coffee at a Solana Beach cafe, as his wife, Susie, fielded phone calls and Hannah tapped away on her hot-pink laptop. “One sense I had is that everybody is going through this same thing in some way in life. I went through life not knowing how much pain other people had. That blew me away dramatically.”

One of the many strange things about Nancarrow’s life right now is that he feels really good. Probably because he no longer has a tumor pressing on his left frontal lobe. In two weeks, he will start his treatment, which will involve a combination of radiation therapy and chemo pills. At that point, he may not feel as good as he does now. But in this suspended-animation moment, he is actually sort of OK. In some ways, he is sort of better.

“The first week or two, we laughed a lot, but we very easily cried a lot, too,” said Nancarrow of Susie and his kids — 23-year-old Hannah, 24-year-old Graham and 19-year-old Britta. “It was a reminder that you really need to tell someone you love them every day.”

This mood-swinging chapter in Nancarrow’s life gets a full public airing on the blog he never wanted to start and now can’t imagine doing without. Launched in January, the Loren Nancarrow blog
(lorennancarrow.wordpress.com) was a nice outlet for his musings on politics, pessimism and composting. After the MRI, it became something else.

From jaunty references to the tumor he affectionately nicknamed “Blob,” to the straightforward posting of his before- and after-surgery brain scans, Nancarrow’s blog is a sharply observed, occasionally black-humored, mostly unsentimental look at one man’s journey through Cancerland.

“It’s flat-out honest and pure, and I don’t think you can get any better than that,” said Susie, who lost her mother to brain cancer just two weeks after she and Loren got married 27 years ago. “It has given him an opportunity to do what he loves, which is writing and making a difference. Maybe he wasn’t always the most sensitive person on the planet, but now maybe he can help other people face things because he is so pragmatic.”

Despite the dire predictions, Nancarrow does not feel like a man with between one and three years to live. But he does want to make his time count. He and Susie are buying a motorhome and planning short trips to various national parks. They also want to channel the support and resources coming their way into a foundation or charity to be named later.

“The perfect thing people can do for us is figure out who needs help and reach out to them,” Nancarrow said. “I have a great family support unit. I’ve got insurance and a job to go back to. So many people lack one or all of those things, and that really bums me out. The big lesson in this is you need to help other people, and I haven’t done enough of that.”

Nancarrow plans on returning to Fox 5 as soon as his health permits. He also plans on attending all the birthday parties, bar mitzvahs and funerals he avoided in the past. And he is going to keep on blogging. It’s the least he can do for the people who are still doing so much for him.

“I haven’t done anything brave or different from what tens of thousands of San Diegans go through every day,” he said, settling his beanie on his post-surgery head. “I’m just writing about it.”